Droid 2 Global Battery Life

[kenstar]

Mediaserver, Android OS, Display were all around 20%.
unplugged 20 hours. battery was @ 40%.
rooted/setcpu/frozen apps/stock motoblur

I also keep gps/bt/sync off

 

[ExodusC]

Well, I'm still getting rather poor battery life... Maybe 6ish hours with very light usage.

I'm going to cycle the battery from fully charged to 0% a few times and see if that helps.

Sent from my Droid 2 Global using the DroidForums App.

 

[patfactorx]

start freezing the apps that are running that you dont want also

 

[sidsub]

Pardon me, I'm new to Android... With an unrooted phone, if you just kill running services, it doesn't seem to do anything beyond killing them for that session. In other words, I power off and on, and Skype and the News retrieval service and others that I previously killed are back and running.

So, if I root, will it allow me to go in and kill the bloatware permanently? I'm also getting lousy battery life, even though I got the Motorola extended battery. I can get a day out of it, but only if I don't play with it much.

The other issue I see with killing bloatware is knowing what is bloatware and what might do something I care about. Is there some place that has more detailed descriptions of what a particular running service does?

 

[azfreak]

i use my D2G moderately, occassional facebooking and twittering through the day with calls and texts as normal. i get probably close to 14 hours battery life with the brightness all the way down and all gps and stuff off. i would say its substantially right

 

[ExodusC]

I'm currently at 8:15 uptime since my last full charge, with 2:15 minutes of screen-on time. My brightness has been at 50% for most of the day. This seems like a more reasonable battery life than what I have been getting, however this has been with light usage, and the CPU downclocking to 600MHz max with the screen off.

I'm going to cycle the battery a few more times to see if I can get it up some more. Any more suggestions?...

Sent from my Droid 2 Global using the DroidForums App.

 

[kenstar]

Pardon me, I'm new to Android... With an unrooted phone, if you just kill running services, it doesn't seem to do anything beyond killing them for that session. In other words, I power off and on, and Skype and the News retrieval service and others that I previously killed are back and running.

So, if I root, will it allow me to go in and kill the bloatware permanently? I'm also getting lousy battery life, even though I got the Motorola extended battery. I can get a day out of it, but only if I don't play with it much.

The other issue I see with killing bloatware is knowing what is bloatware and what might do something I care about. Is there some place that has more detailed descriptions of what a particular running service does?

yes rooting will let you 'kill' the bloatware permanenty. but, its best to freeze it seeing how you will need them back when it comes time for an update.

 

[BigJermZ]

how do ou freeze the stock apps? I just cycled my phone and playing games and videos online i managed to kill the battery in 3.5hrs (i did leave it for a few minutes a couple times)...is this normal?

 

[NiceGuysFinishLast]

Pardon me, I'm new to Android... With an unrooted phone, if you just kill running services, it doesn't seem to do anything beyond killing them for that session. In other words, I power off and on, and Skype and the News retrieval service and others that I previously killed are back and running.

So, if I root, will it allow me to go in and kill the bloatware permanently? I'm also getting lousy battery life, even though I got the Motorola extended battery. I can get a day out of it, but only if I don't play with it much.

The other issue I see with killing bloatware is knowing what is bloatware and what might do something I care about. Is there some place that has more detailed descriptions of what a particular running service does?

All the system apps will restart themselves almost immediately after you kill them. That's why people say not to use a task killer. Killing them and restarting them constantly uses more battery than just letting them run. If you kill the bloatware completely, you leave your phone incapable of receiving over the air updates from Verizon. The updates run as a patch, so before they run, they look for EVERY system file that came on your phone.. This includes all the stock crap like blockbuster/amazon/etc... If those files aren't there, the update won't run. So to get around this, you can either rename those files, so that they won't run, but you can change them back when you need to (most people recommend changing the extension from .apk to .bak or something easy to remember.. You can search for more on this method), or you can get Titanium Backup, which is a slick tool that allows you to do this with a GUI, as well as backup/restore all your apps, and many other things. Give it a whirl. To use Titanium Backup, you'll need to root your phone. Don't worry, you can get Z4Root (google it, there's a great thread at xda developers) for free, and it's literally two clicks to root or unroot your phone, with no risk.

You can also google (or search this forum) for lists of what applications are ok to freeze. I got rid of a good many just through common sense, the filenames are pretty easy. I don't touch anything that begins with com.motorola.xxxxx, though. Words of advice: NEVER TOUCH BACKUPASSISTANT. I say again... NEVER TOUCH BACKUPASSISTANT. I don't know for sure that it will screw up your phone, I've never tried it on mine, but the internet is full of horror stories of it bricking phones. Also, if you want to be able to send MMS, you need to leave the stock text messaging and gallery apps unfrozen.

Finally, once you've rooted and frozen all that stock bullcrap, get SetCPU. It lets you set your max/min CPU speeds based on certain conditions. For example, when my screen is off, mine are 600/300MHz. If my battery temp goes over 42C, it does the same. Get autokiller to kill unnecessary background apps. It uses the built in android processes to kill apps, and it only runs once at startup, to write your settings, then lets the android service handle everything else. Thanks to this app, my free RAM rarely drops below 200MB. Autokiller is smart enough to not kill the apps that will just restart again, and it has a built in task manager, for when you want to manually end processes.

Oh, and get quicksettings, which is the ONLY app I've found so far that gives you one touch on/off for the GPS (all the others I've tried take you to the settings menu where you can click "enable gps"), as well as the usual WiFi/bluetooth, etc... It's also got a flashlight button that lights up the whole screen, which is nice, since I haven't found an app that turns on the D2G's LED torch (except that stupid instant heart rate monitor app, which sucks). I use this to keep my data/wifi off at all times, except when I'm actively using them (I'm not important enough to need constant email notifications).

With all of these, and the BP7X extended battery (and my brightness at 25%), I can easily pull 2-3 days of light to moderate use. I regularly go 18 hours before my battery is at 50%.

 

[sidsub]

Thank you, NiceGuysFinishLast. That was the comprehensive list I needed. I'm going to go through all those steps.

 

[ExodusC]

Well, here's something interesting. I went to sleep with 80% battery, and the nighttime saver battery profile enabled. When I woke up, I had about 9:30 runtime since my last full charge, with 5% battery life remaining.

This is ridiculous, I lost so much battery life with the phone idle for about 6 or 7 hours! I need to figure something out, because I should not be getting this kind of awful battery life.

Sent from my Droid 2 Global using the DroidForums App.

 

[steeda2005]

Ok, so I did the application thinger. Do I have to do that every day? Not sure about the power option for the back light. Can't find that. Slow down on the rooting Im already confused. Lol...I love this phone but goodness, I'm such a tard when it comes to it. I play 3 games almost hourly, so my phone is pretty much on the charger all the time. I will try the battery thinger u said to do. I'll let u know how it turns out. Thanks for helping me.

Lisa

Sent from my DROID2 GLOBAL using DroidForums App

 

[BigJermZ]

OK so last night i was able to kill the battery in just 3.5hrs (by playing games and streaming videos) after charging all night i unplugged it at 6:30AM and so far with no real usage other than checking the screen and a couple phone calls...
90% @ 7:30
80% @ 9:00
70% @ 9:50

should i drop the phone off at verizon to check the battery?
phone is set at 1Ghz,
backlight on auto,
battery mode on nighttime saver


i will update post as the day goes on...

well I called customer service and they told me the phones battery should not drop that fast and to take it in to test out...
verizon now has the phone and will test out the battery (by placing a 1hr long phone call)

so in a couple of hours i will get my verdict.

 

[sixstringedmatt]

^ I would suggest turning off Auto Brightness.

I have been using this thing since Monday, and the battery life is slowly getting better, although I admit I haven't been to taxing on the phone. I am using the Fission ROM and SetCPU to underclock the phone at certain battery levels, and also drop it down to 300Mhz when the screen is off. The phone is also under-clocked to 1Ghz. I use Max Battery on the settings there, and I am still seeing how this all treats me. I think I need an extended battery regardless. Having to pay so much attention to conserving battery on this thing is excessive.

 

[BigJermZ]

^ I would suggest turning off Auto Brightness.

I have been using this thing since Monday, and the battery life is slowly getting better, although I admit I haven't been to taxing on the phone. I am using the Fission ROM and SetCPU to underclock the phone at certain battery levels, and also drop it down to 300Mhz when the screen is off. The phone is also under-clocked to 1Ghz. I use Max Battery on the settings there, and I am still seeing how this all treats me. I think I need an extended battery regardless. Having to pay so much attention to conserving battery on this thing is excessive.

I agree i wanted the power so i bought the d2g and now i have the power i want but i just cant use it as i want.....
I am also thinking about the extended battery, verizon's test will be the last option before moving on to another battery.